On Tuesday UnitedHealth Group reported a terrific first quarter, with strong performance across nearly all business lines. There was one exception: The conglomerate’s insurance exchange unit raised its projected Affordable Care Act losses for 2016 to $650 million from $525 million, after booking $475 million in red ink last year.
CEO Stephen Hemsley said ObamaCare’s instability, small market size and costly patient population “continue to suggest we cannot broadly serve it on an effective and sustained basis.” He said UnitedHealth will withdraw to “only a handful of states” in 2017.
Normally sedate insurance markets have been roiled by everything from the federally chartered co-op failures to enrollment well below projections. ObamaCare’s architecture also makes it economically rational for consumers to wait until they are about to incur major medical expenses to get covered, and administratively created “special enrollment periods” encourage such gaming.
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